Spoiler: the whole swamp is pea soup, the pot is not.

It's A Cauldron of Endless Bog Water. The merchant lost it a while back and came here to retrieve it after tales spread of a new swamp popping up out of nowhere.

You misspelled it but it is.

What is half the value of "a leather jerkin, soaked and blood and gut-juice, with two arrow sized holes and one axe sized hole"? Zero? Or perhaps a negative value because having it makes the owner look guilty of murder?

I think I had a dm once say like "the armor didn't work for the last bloke, why would I want it?"

If I ever play D&D again, I think I'm going to spend a lot of time in session 0 getting on the same page about if we're playing D&D as a resource management game, or as a wacky hijinks game. So many people want to play the latter, but expect a long rest to be as easy as it is in video games.

"I'm out of spells! Can we long rest?"

"You're out of spells after casting nearly every single round of combat in the past 3 fights, and you want to chill out for 8 to 16 hours here, in the court of the evil duke's castle, while he's working on a ritual to summon a demon lord in a few hours?"

I mean, I kind of get it. The game is set up so you have all these cool toys. Of course you want to use them. That conflict is why I dislike per-day resources.